Perfect Stranger: A gripping psychological thriller with nail-biting suspense

by Jake Cross

  But there was one absolute fact: cancer. Chris’s presence in her life might have prevented a suicide, but death ultimately wouldn’t be denied. As her husband, he would have had to deal with that. He would have had to accept the news of the cancer, and comfort her as she spiralled into depression, and explain to a little girl that her mummy was soon going to vanish.

  And there would be no Julia. That was all the reason he needed to be assured that he had done the right thing. Julia was alive and maybe Katie and Eve and that entire extended family had lived much longer than they would have if he’d announced his real name back in Indiana.

  He smiled at his own silliness. Parallel universes? Things were as they were and that was the end of it. He may have lost his mother, but he still had Julia and Rose. The grass was definitely greener on this side.

  He jerked as he thought he caught a glimpse of movement from within, over by a door near a staircase. He watched for a few seconds, but the scene remained unchanged. Then he backed away and headed for his car, figuring that an empty pub would be Shangri-La to squatters.

  As he started his engine, his phone rang. Rose.

  ‘Traffic,’ he said, and then instantly regretted the lie. ‘Got caught up in it on my way to Bradford.’

  ‘Bradford? What are you doing in Bradford?’ Rose asked.

  He hesitated, then decided to come clean. ‘I popped out to Eve’s old pub, just to have a look. I know what you’re going to say.’

  ‘Wish you married the pub heiress, eh?’ she said, laughter not quite masking her concern. ‘Thinking of the life you could have had with her?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Rose. I don’t waste my time thinking about what-ifs.’

  Ringxiety. Chris checked his phone so many times during the first hour at home that Julia snatched it off him and had a look.

  ‘You better not be having an affair,’ she said, glaring right into his eyes. It made him laugh. And then hug her. His elegant, beautiful daughter, at times immature and naïve, sometimes logical and serious, but always protective of her mother.

  The hug, right out of the blue, freaked Julia out even more and she called for her mother, saying, ‘Dad was being weird.’

  He laughed until a sudden thought reminded him that he might soon have to refer to her as his youngest daughter.

  Later, Rose went into the kitchen to work on her non-fiction book for half an hour and Julia shifted upstairs. Chris lounged on the sofa and tried to concentrate on a Netflix programme but couldn’t follow the plot with half a mind. He tried a book, but that was worse. So he closed his eyes and put his head back.

  A noise woke him forty minutes later, close to eight. Or rather, a series of noises. Rose was in the living room with him, whistling while ironing like a happy old farmer.

  ‘I found what I needed about the Broad Plain Gymnasium,’ she said, and then the iron belched a cloud of steam like an old locomotive pulling out of a station.

  ‘Spectacular,’ he said, although he had no clue what she meant. She was writing a book about the history of British gymnastics and some of its major players, but, as much as he loved his wife, that was as much as he cared about. She hadn’t practised the sport in years, but the interest had never waned. The book was her way of staying involved.

  He got up for a drink of water. From the dining room, a blizzard of screeches and roars and crashes. He stopped at the doorway and saw Julia playing her damn Xbox game on her portable TV. Something demonic was hacking away at a bigger monster surrounded by flying creatures. He saw flashing neon blades and fireballs and all manner of kaleidoscopic weirdness, every bit of it accompanied by tremendous noise.

  ‘Julia, it’s time to go and get that friend of yours. Turn that off.’

  ‘Can’t yet,’ she called back without looking away from the screen. ‘Need to kill this Cyclops Boss to get the next Save Point Power Medallion.’

  ‘Silly me.’

  He got the water and settled on the sofa as Rose tossed aside the last piece of ironing and collapsed the board. Hopefully, Julia’s game would consume her for the evening and she’d forget about having to collect Simone, and they could enjoy a quiet evening in as a family.

  ‘Turn that noisy crap off!’ Rose yelled towards the dining room.

  ‘Dvark’s on half-life-bar!’ Julia shouted back.

  ‘Can’t save the game until she gets a power jewel or whatever,’ he said.

  Rose shook her head at him.

  For the first time in a couple of days, he found himself content. He was submerged in the normal chaos of his home life, on his own sofa, warm, surrounded by people he loved, all of them happy and there wasn’t much more he could ask for.

  He didn’t want the terrain to change, but he knew the map might soon alter for ever.

  Twelve

  The place they were picking up Simone was called the Lost Valley because it was in a corner of Sheffield’s Meadow Park and surrounded by trees. A high wall separated the pub’s beer garden from the park, but Julia’s friend was coming from the train station on the other side of the park and the walk around was three times as long as a straight trek through. So Simone was going to climb the wall and meet Julia in the beer garden. Chris pulled up in the car park fifteen minutes before Simone’s train was due and turned off the satnav. Here he finally got the will to vocalise his thoughts.

  ‘Julia. I think you should ask Simone to stay at her parents’ house.’

  She gave him a sly smile. ‘This is about that crap at her party, isn’t it? What do you think she’s going to do? She was drunk back then, and you were in a bad mood.’

  ‘It’s not about what she’ll do. I’m worried it’ll make for an uncomfortable atmosphere.’

  ‘Only uncomfortable for you. Simone wouldn’t have asked if she felt it would be a problem being around you. Although she did say she would keep out of your way.’

  He sighed. ‘Well, she shouldn’t feel she has to, but okay.’

  ‘Sorry, Dad, but Mum said it was okay, and I didn’t think it would be a big deal. Walk me into the garden to wait. Get the awkward first meeting out of the way quickly.’

  ‘No. I’ll wait in the car, in the warm.’

  ‘Fair enough, Mr Grumpy.’

  Julia headed in.

  But Chris didn’t wait, instead choosing to take a drive.

  He was back half an hour later. He parked and washed his hands with a bottle of water before strolling into the garden. Each table was on a circle of concrete and had an inviting-looking outdoor heater. Peaceful, apart from the thump of rock music from inside the pub. Julia had chosen the closest table to the garden wall. She sat alone.

  ‘She’s not here,’ Julia said as Chris rubbed his cold hands before the pot-bellied heater. ‘But the train was on time.’

  ‘Maybe she bumped into the togmuppet.’

  ‘Funny.’ Julia tugged her eyes away to glance at the wall. Nobody toppled off it and came running. ‘I’ll call her again.’ She got up to make a call out of his earshot. It took only seconds. ‘No answer. Again! Dead tone. If that bitch didn’t even get the train, I’ll kill her.’

  ‘Bitch? Sorry, I thought we were meeting your good friend.’

  ‘She’s a grand master at cancelling without telling people. She’s got our postcode. If she’s not here by ten, she can get a taxi.’

  They chatted about nothing for a while. Two chicken wrap meals were brought out by a young woman who looked real pissed off that she had to travel to the furthest table in the garden. Her long face made Chris put away the small tip he had ready for her.

  ‘You can have Simone’s, Dad. I ordered for us both, but she’s so late she can get stuffed.’

  They ate, and Chris tried not to feel ignored as Julia played with her phone.

  ‘Is that Facebook? I was just thinking how long it’s been since I checked it to see whose dog has been photographed sleeping,’ he said.

  She just nodded, barely hearing.

  ‘I could be missing out on
seeing what someone’s cooked for dinner,’ he continued.

  ‘Huhum,’ she said, still hypnotised.

  ‘I should upload the photos of that time aliens abducted me for mating with their women.’

  ‘Sure,’ she murmured.

  He was white noise to her, so he played a game on his own phone until ten o’clock rolled around. Julia went to the wall and found a hole for her toes so she could peek her head over, into the black woody gloom beyond.

  ‘Is she frozen into a block of ice out there?’ Chris called out.

  ‘It’s a fifteen-minute walk from the station.’

  She retook her seat. The heater was coin-operated and Chris didn’t have another coin. They both started to feel the cold, and Chris was relieved when Julia reached a critical level of boredom and frustration. She sent her friend a text and left a voicemail, and they headed home.

  Chris woke in the dead hours and immediately worried why. Normally, he’d go downstairs and check the windows, in case a noise had stirred him. But he didn’t doubt that some unremembered dream about Katie had done the job tonight. Rose was on her left side, left forearm poking straight out. Once, he’d found her in that position and been unable to resist a joke. A Dear Jane letter slotted into her fingers, which she’d found upon waking. She’d been quite upset. She tried to hide her fears that he’d leave her for someone with pretty fingers and spreadable legs, but she wasn’t the only one who could read a spouse’s mind.

  And that had been back before sleeping on the same side all night could wreck her for two days. So he rolled her onto her back and got up.

  Out on the landing, he opened the attic trapdoor and jumped to latch his fingers over the edge. It was far more of a struggle than last time to haul himself through the hatch and into the attic, and he wondered if the last few weeks of Rose’s healthy food had actually put weight on him. But he was in. He flicked on the light and crossed the grid of beams to a space cleared amid old junk where he had a plastic outdoor chair next to a tiny coffee table. Both were dusty, as too was the half-empty bottle of Proper Twelve whiskey that sat alone on the table. The last time he had sat here, in his private hideaway, to sip and blot out the world, had been five weeks earlier, when Rose’s mother had a mini stroke and Rose had withdrawn internally while she recovered. The time before that had been because of a friend’s death, some five months ago.

  Only now, remembering those tragedies, did he realise that he was putting this latest life development in the same category. Perhaps not quite a tragedy, but certainly a hammer blow that was going to send his life down a new track. Unless the paternity test came back negative. Maybe even then.

  This was his private room, the Manor, for emptying the mind, so he sat and he sipped and he worked on doing that. It was the only place he could manage it. It was why he’d removed the trap ladder, so nobody could see his private little domain, let alone enter it. No one knew he came up here and he even got a mild sort of kick from the secret. Here, he easily managed to shut down the voice that was telling him his life would run smoother if Katie’s real father turned out to be the one who’d got beaten to death.

  WEDNESDAY

  Thirteen

  When Chris arrived at work the next day, he noticed there were four police cars parked outside the hospital’s main entrance but gave them no further thought.

  He soon would.

  He trekked to the lab, dumped his coat and went to his bench. But before he could begin lifesaving, Alan collared him.

  ‘Carla phoned in. Hurt her foot on that damn car of hers. Won’t be in, surprise, surprise. Guess she can’t read.’ He jerked his head at a plaque above his office door which contained a long-winded warning about the menace of missed workdays. ‘You do HVS as well as your own department today, Redfern.’

  HVS was the department that dealt with samples taken from more intimate areas of the body.

  Chris shifted reluctantly over to the HVS bench. An hour later, someone brought up the microbiology box from Specimen Collection, which was where all samples from the wards were assembled. Chris decided to wait until the throng around the box had dispersed before he looked for the HVS samples, but a gangly guy called Lionel Parrott, a twenty-two-year-old Medical Lab assistant rumoured to enjoy kicking the daylights out of homeless men with his mates at the weekend, appeared by his side with a bag and a grin.

  ‘You want to swap benches for a while? I want to do Meadow Moll’s sample.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Have you been in a cave?’ Parrott asked. ‘The girl that got attacked last night.’

  No gossip pleased Parrot more than crime and violence. He gleefully explained that an early morning jogger had found an unconscious young blonde woman half battered to death, babbling incoherently: possibly drugged. And possibly sexually assaulted, because the bag in Parrott’s hand apparently contained an intimate sample.

  That explained all the cops downstairs. They were waiting for this Meadow Moll to blurt a name so they could go crack the corresponding head. Chris reached for the bag, but Parrott kept it out of reach, like a treasure.

  ‘We could crack this case,’ Parrott said.

  ‘She came in this morning, Lionel. She’s not going to show sexual disease symptoms in a couple of hours. If she’s got something, she already had it.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean she wasn’t raped,’ was Parrott’s answer.

  Chris tried his best not to frown. ‘All her sample will tell us is what infection she has. We’re not going to get her attacker’s name. You won’t get your picture in the Journal of Forensic Science.’

  ‘If she’s got something and she was raped, he’ll get it, won’t he? It could be something tying him to all his victims.’

  ‘All? What are you talking about?’

  Lionel nodded rapidly. ‘This guy will get bolder, and start killing. This is the low-key start of some serial killing spree that’ll shock the world, Chris. Just watch—’

  ‘Piss off, Lionel. You’d love that, I know. Not every attack is some serial killer.’

  ‘No, no, trust me. They start like this. I read about it. The Yorkshire Ripper, the Suffolk Strangler. You watch. Meadow Moll is just a warm-up.’

  ‘What’s with that name? Meadow Moll?’

  ‘Moll. Prostitute. Like Moll Flanders. That’s the nickname going round the hospital. You really haven’t heard this story? Everyone’s been talking about it.’

  He hadn’t. And the normal humdrum atmosphere in the lab said nobody but Lionel thought this was the biggest story ever.

  ‘Who says she was a prostitute?’ Chris asked.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure the police won’t say that. But that’ll just be bullshit for her family. Meadow Park’s known for the ladies of the night. She was a whore and this guy was a punter—’

  Chris snatched the bag from Parrott and checked the label.

  His breath caught.

  Chris’s phone rang, cutting his interest in the next table, where a McDonald’s employee chatted with a patient in a dressing gown. Lunchtime at the Pitstop café, and he was still waiting for his daughter to call him back – youngest daughter, perhaps. Immediately after reading the name on Parrott’s bag, he’d darted out of the lab for privacy to send her a text.

  ‘Call me as soon as you get this. Dad x’

  ‘Did you hear anything from Simone?’ Julia said, stress evident in her voice. ‘I still can’t reach her. I just called the flat she shares at university and I called her parents. No one’s heard from her; they thought she was with me. What if she went off with some lad and something’s happened?’

  ‘Something’s happened,’ Chris said, and then he told her that Simone had been attacked. She was now a patient in his hospital.

  Cut to pieces, Julia excused herself from the call in order to find her mother.

  Chris sat quietly for a few minutes, chewing chocolate cake and trying to process what had happened. He was almost ready to make his way back to the lab when Julia’s name flashed up on hi
s phone screen again.

  ‘Hello? How are you, love?’ he asked.

  ‘The police just called me,’ Julia blurted. ‘Simone’s parents told them she was meeting me. They said they want me to go to the station. They’re sending a car. What do I do? Mum says I just have to tell the truth.’

  Fearful that a nosy sod like himself might overhear, Chris kept his voice low and rubbed his nose to hide his mouth. ‘She’s right. Just tell them what happened. Just say we both waited at the pub for her.’

  ‘What if they know about the argument? I argued with Simone earlier that day. And then I sent her a voicemail after we got home and said I’d beat her silly if she stood me up for a boy. What if the police know that? They can get phone call information from phone companies.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. They’re not going to think you had anything to do with this, Julia. You’re a hundred pounds soaking wet. We were waiting for her. We were at the pub and then at home. Your voicemail proves we were still waiting for her.’

  ‘I know, I know. I just… I know it looks bad. And I feel so guilty. What if it happened after we left? Have you been to see her?’

  Simone wasn’t allowed visitors and Julia likely thought that by working in the hospital, Chris could get around this. But nobody was allowed near her except the police, close family, and the staff looking after her. He explained this.

  ‘But I’ll try to find out how she’s doing.’

  He wasn’t going to tell her that Simone’s sample was in his lab, or why.

  ‘She was coming to us, Dad. She had to cross Meadow Park from the train station. It was my fault for picking that pub.’

  Her voice was weak, and Chris couldn’t help but picture his little girl, half the age she was now, still in pigtails. It broke his heart.